Icon of Michael the archangel

By the ninth century Eastern Orthodoxy was confined on its eastern flank by the Church of the East and Islamic expansion and on its western flank by the Church of Rome. This left open the possibility of expansion to the north. In 863 the Patriarch Photius sent the brothers Cyril and Methodius as missionaries to the Slavs. Although the area to which they were sent, now Moravia, eventually became the domain of Latin Christianity from the West, the Slavonic translations of the Bible and liturgy prepared by Cyril and Methodius were eventually used in Bulgaria, Serbia, and Russia. Bulgaria and Serbia were evangelized in the ninth century, but Byzantine evangelism did not penetrate Russia until 988. In contrast to Roman Catholicism, Byzantine evangelism emphasized indigenization. It was Orthodox practice to translate both Bible and liturgy into vernacular tongues for the sake of the spread of the Gospel and to permit settled churches the privileges of autocephaly.